Ben Rhodes

very involved with these issues of wrongful detention for the last 10 years.

How are you seeing the number of these cases trending, how they're being handled diplomatically?

For a while, it definitely seemed like Trump

really liked hostage return.

It sort of, I think, scratched his itch for a headline, a discreet thing, a victory lap, a sense of success, even if it was kind of a piece of a puzzle and the rest of the puzzle is unsolved.

But what are you seeing?

I hope that is true.

I was talking to a friend today, actually, that one of the things that I will like tip my hat to Donald Trump on and say, you know, hope those changes stick is he does not care about this sort of like old, stupid, we don't talk with our enemies.

We don't talk to our terrorist bullshit like Adam Bowler, his special envoy for hostage affairs, talked directly with Hamas.

I think that's good.

I also think, you know,

I do think he approaches hostage negotiations like you just said, like it's a good thing to get these Americans home period paragraph.

I will never forget kind of the feeling of when Bo Bergdahl, a U.S.

service member who had been held for five years by the Taliban, came home.

And it's evolved into such an ugly partisan fight in a way that shocked me.

Now, some of it was, you know, service members who served with him expressing their anger about the situation, his walking off their base, put them in.

So, I mean, I think that's totally justified.

But I also fear that, you know, the next time a Democrat's in charge, that we might see some of the same sort of partisan, you're weak attacks from Republicans.

But I'm trying to be hopeful that that won't happen.

Yeah.